SOURCE: "The Wrecked Generation," in Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 1991, pp. 8-9.

In the review below, Wood discusses the role of comedy in Fates Worse than Death.

Dreamy, hectically anecdotal, slovenly and bearish with the truth, Kurt Vonnegut's writing has always handled fact with comic negligence. It has a kind of epistemological cockiness, amassing detail only to mock its sureties. Knowledge enters his books with a hiatus, a cloudiness. Consider, for example, his fondness for place-name couplets—Genoa, Italy, or Hellertown, Pennsylvania, or Indianapolis, Indiana. He loads his sentences with all kinds of names: "They were Lance Rumfoord, of Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, who had been a childhood sweet-heart of John F. Kennedy, in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts." This is a kind of nonsense verse—mildly subversive, rhythmical, sprawling, but comically precise ("the former Cynthia Landry"). It is not that names like George Minor...